Dirk Bouts, 'Christ Crowned with Thorns', about 1470

Christ wears the rich cloak and the crown of thorns in which, according to the Gospels, he was dressed before he was crucified – but the wounds of the Passion (his torture and crucifixion) indicate that he has already died and been resurrected. The burnished gold background tells us that he is now in a heavenly rather than an earthly realm.

Dirk Bouts has painted every agonising detail: the blue shadows of the thorns thrust deep into his forehead, and those around the holes in his hands; his translucent tears mingled with the blood dripping down his face. This graphic image might seem shocking now, but in the late fifteenth century images of the weeping and suffering Christ were very popular, and were produced in large numbers in the workshop of Bouts and his followers. The quality of this painting and the skill with which the artist has worked wet into wet paint to achieve the details of the jewels, the embroidery and the crown suggest it is by Bouts himself. Its painting technique is similar to that of Portrait of a Man (Jan van Winckele?).

Small devotional paintings like this were used to aid private prayer. The painting was clearly intended to be seen close up, and the level of detail draws us deeper and deeper in. We can see every hair in Christ’s beard and eyebrows, and the tears in his red-rimmed eyes. The gold background is flecked with painted dots and hatched lines, making a halo of gold, red, green and blue rings around Christ’s head.

The painting’s focus on Christ’s body was intended to remind Christian viewers that God became man and died on the Cross for humanity’s sake. Popular religious movements of the late fifteenth century held that meditation on the pain of the Passion offered a route to salvation. In the Netherlands Devotio Moderna (‘Modern Devotion’, a religious movement which focused on personal spirituality rather than church ritual) encouraged meditation on the pain inflicted by the crown of thorns. Thomas à Kempis, an important early member of the movement, wrote a prayer to the head of Christ describing the ‘most grievous sufferings which, in the thorny coronation of your sacred head, you endured for us’.

Joseph Henry Green, an eminent surgeon and friend of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, owned the painting in the nineteenth century. It was left to the National Gallery by Green’s wife.